Lord Winston warned yesterday that nurses with poor English were a potential danger to patients. He told peers: “Communication between the patient and the professional is of vital importance. We run the risk of losing it with this issue of nurses who can’t speak the English language and have been trained in a different way.”

It’s curious that in the debate about our need for immigration, one of the most frequently cited examples is the NHS, which, without foreigners, would collapse. During the leadership contest last year Nick Clegg pointed to a local maternity ward which, without foreign staff, would be unable to cope with the large increase in children being born. It never really occurred to anyone to point out that this baby boom is entirely driven by immigration, but thank God anyway for the overseas-born midwives without whom overseas-born women wouldn’t be able to use NHS hospitals.

Immigration is a difficult subject, sentimentalised by the Left, so when it is combined with the National Health Service, the most sentimentalised of all subjects – criticising it in front of a Labour voter is like questioning the Virgin Mary’s honour to a Pole – its sentimentality increases exponentially. After all, you'll be told, a third of all doctors are born overseas, and over 30 per cent of NHS staff are foreign.

But do we actually need foreigners, or that many foreigners, in our health service? It’s a question almost never asked. Yet in the United States, which has a far more diverse work force, only 15 per cent of medical staff come from abroad. Why do we need, proportionally, twice as many? Because the NHS, with its virtual monopoly, is able to artificially set wages, usually below the market rate. It’s rarely commented on, but Britain started importing foreign doctors because British doctors were heading abroad, usually to the States, to earn a more reasonable salary.

Meanwhile, we congratulate ourselves on hiring staff from countries that are often desperately short of medical staff (sure, they get remittances, but they lose educated, intelligent, skilled people, usually for good).

The paradox is that we only need foreign staff because of the NHS’s monopoly, but we only have socialised medicine because of the high levels of social solidarity Britain had acquired by the 1940s, and we only gained that because Britain was a fairly homogenous country with a strong national identity, one where people felt close enough to their fellow citizens to want to pay their medical bills. Yet that solidarity has long been in steep decline, and many of the people who treat the NHS as their new religion aren’t actually too keen on the N part.

And what’s more, while we’re always grateful to people who treat us, and I’m in awe of anyone who can both attain a medical degree and work in a foreign language, foreign medical staff on average aren’t actually as good as the British – foreign doctors, for example, are four times more likely to be struck off. Maybe we need to start rethinking our ideas about medicine and immigration.